High-Tech Surgery
  Minimally invasive surgery is performed through small incisions, patients can often go home the same day, instead of the days or weeks in the hospital that open surgery can require. But it does have limitations. The direct touch and feel of surgery is replaced by a video screen and surgical tools are inserted through long shafts. 
  (Adrian Park) We operate off a screen and so we’re operating in a three-dimensional space in one geographic domain and we are actually looking at what we are doing off a two dimensional image. 
 And that’s where medicine and technology meet. 
  (Brent Seales) So what we are hoping to do is to build new technologies using computers to improve the safety and effectiveness of doing surgery with scopes. So this project is looking at ways to make what you see from the scope a much more rich environment, a much more simple environment in which to operate. 
 There's more.  This groundbreaking visualization technology could one day help doctors’ at large medical centers like UK to see inside patients’ hours away in rural hospitals, in detail, providing their expertise without requiring the patient to travel. 
  (Dr. Lee Todd) It’s one of the best projects we’ve ever had where we can take technology that we have developed and invented and worked on here at the visualization center and move it out to the rural areas where we can help those doctors provide better care to the people of Kentucky. 
But developing technology like this cost millions of dollars. 
  (Dr. Lee Todd) It's very beneficial for us, for our elected officials to find those dollars for us.  And as Senator McConnell says, he likes to get us the training wheels and then it’s up to us to stay on the path. So he’s brought us about seven million dollars for this minimal invasive surgery project. 
  But all those involved say this is a worthy investment in the future of healthcare.
  (Adrian Park) If we do this right, we will be able to kind of be in the forefront, kind of always working on improving the image, how we see it, how we interact with it, what information it imparts to us, what information we can import to the image.  This is going to be a constant, how important this is.  
 For UK Healthcare, I'm Beth Goins.